Blogs Are Cool Again

One of the biggest stories in the last few months was that email, the technology everyone loves to hate, is having a comeback. I mean, did you really expect to read the phrase below in the post-social-media world:

[email is an] exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.

Email? exciting? We are entering a brave old world.

But enough about email. It seems blogs are also becoming cool and exciting. I have written before on why I think a blog wins over social media, and it seems the idea is catching on. Yesterday both Fred Wilson (a legendary investor in tech stocks and social media), and Brent Simmons (a known iOS developer) have written about the resurrection and importance of blogs.

Here’s what Fred Wilson had to say:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today,

And here is a paragraph as strong as you can get from Brent Simmons:

My blog is older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It has seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it will still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

Wow..

So what is it about blogs that makes them more like email than like social media? The three posts I linked to basically make the same argument: Like email, the personal blog’s technology is not owned and controlled by a company. It’s a decentralized technology that goes whenever you go. If you choose to follow a blog, no company like facebook can decide whether or not you can read its posts. So don’t hesitate to blog away. If you think blogs are dying, ask yourself: Are emails going away anytime soon?